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Ross Revolutionizes Bonten Media MC Ops

NEW YORK—The Bonten Media Group
operates local television stations throughout
the United States, affiliated with ABC,
NBC, Fox, CW and This TV.

Three of our smaller California stations
in Eureka, Chico and Redding had been
operating with SD-era control rooms for a
long time. To continue providing the highest-
quality programming, we decided last
year to upgrade the control rooms for HD
and combine the separate facilities into a
single master control with centralcasting
originating from Redding.

The new Bonten Media Redding, Calif. centralcasting operation

ONE INTO THREE
We knew that combining the separate
master control rooms into one would save
on operating costs and allow us to retain
more control over programming. It would
mean only one facility to staff and maintain,
and a single routing infrastructure to deal
with, as well as only having to purchase
HD equipment for a single site, rather than
three.

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As part of the upgrade, we installed a
Ross Video NK router, along with Ross router
control panels, 12 MC1 master control
switching cards and associated openGear
equipment. We backed this package up
with Crispin automation, which integrates
quite nicely with the MC1 system.

We chose Ross’s MC1 because it’s
loaded with useful features, competitively
priced, built to meet the demands of 24/7
operation, five-year warranty, and also provides
complete program path protection
via input bypass relays.

The system’s hot-swap capability that
allows us to replace any on-air channel
card with a spare MC1-MK card and have
all of the channel’s parameters automatically
assigned to the replacement card.
The MC1 also has a very compact footprint,
which allowed us to free up a lot of
space—an important consideration given
that we were combining three MC operations
into one.

The new setup provides control of all
primary and subchannels from the MC1s,
which is very useful from a workflow perspective.
And while our intent was to operate
the MC1s as a fully automated system, I
really like having the flexibility to control
them directly with Ross Video’s Dashboard
user-customizable control system that
enables us to quickly create tailored control
panels that make complex operations
simple.

The support we’ve received from Ross
throughout this entire project has been stellar.
It’s like having a partner who is an expert
in live production working alongside. An
other big plus is the way that Ross keeps on
communicating with its customers to find
out what sort of new features they’d like to
see. They then use this information to update
their products—including the MCI—with
additional features to make them even better.

Ross’s MC1 is revolutionizing the way
people think about doing master control. It’s
an MC switching system that’s hard to beat.

Tom Cupp is vice president of engineering
at the Bonten Media Group. He
may be contacted at[email protected].

For additional information, contact Ross Video at 613-652-4886613-652-4886 or visitwww.rossvideo.com.